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Several hundred Yahoo employees received the opposite of a Christmas present this week, learning the company is letting them go to ease its payroll burden. In addition to shedding 4 percent of its workforce, the shrinking web giant is shutting down AltaVista, Buzz and Delicious — according to an internal company slide.

The Wall Street Journal quotes a Yahoo spokesperson who verified the information on the slide and said the company is “evaluating its options” for the seemingly doomed sites. The spokesperson continues:

“Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond.

“We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months,” she added. “We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.”

I’ll miss Buzz, which I found to be a handy and powerful news aggregator, capable of, say, picking up a story about an obscure personal finance book and launching it to a top-300 Amazon ranking for a couple days.

What role do the soon-to-be-shuttered Yahoo products play in your online expeditions?